Not being able to explain yourself clearly is rarely an eloquence problem: the 3-minute note-taking method from "Learn Precise Expression in 5 Days"

I’ll finish writing the recommendation first, and leave the rest here.

Previously, Caishi Culture (opens in a new tab) published “Have an idea but can’t express it well?” When the manuscript of “Learn Accurate Expression in 5 Days” came in the mail, I promised to write a recommendation. Finally, the passage printed in the book is:

In the past few years of teaching writing, I have seen too many people think that they are short of words or have poor writing skills, but in fact they have not thought clearly about their ideas. This book breaks down the vaguest process into three visible steps: writing down experiences and feelings, listening to yourself for 3 minutes, and then condensing it into a sentence. Once you think clearly, the words will come out naturally.

There are only more than a hundred words in the recommendation. I put in the sentence that I wanted to say the most, and there was no room for the rest. This article just records the voices of those who have no place to put them.

I have seen that pause too many times

Let me first talk about a scene that I encounter almost every month.

A very well-qualified professional with a long list of things to do, and countless certificates and training records sat in front of me.

I asked him to introduce himself in one sentence. He would pause for a few seconds and then give a breezy three-minute version. The explanation itself is not wrong, every sentence is true, but after listening to it, you still can’t figure out who he is.

In the past, I classified this matter as a positioning (opens in a new tab) issue, and also wrote a special article on this issue. But this book made me realize that that pause actually happens earlier than positioning. It’s not that he doesn’t know how to condense it, it’s that he has never laid out those things in front of him and looked at them again. What he had in his mind was an unorganized mess of raw materials, and I wanted him to hand over the finished product right then and there.

The author Toshiya Araki makes this matter more straightforward in the book. He said that the school offers Chinese language classes, but not expression classes; the company provides business etiquette training and IT skills training, but never expression training. Regarding communication and expression, we have been asked for decades, but no one has taught us.

The most counterintuitive sentence in this book

Toshiya Araki has been an advertising copywriter for Dentsu (opens in a new tab) in Japan for nearly 20 years. He has handled more than 100 advertising projects. He has won awards at both the Cannes International Festival of Creativity (opens in a new tab) and The One Show (opens in a new tab). He has won more than 20 advertising awards in Japan and abroad. With such qualifications, even I would expect him to teach us how to speak beautifully.

But, he didn’t. The first proposition of the book is: the foundation of expression is the ability to listen.

And instead of listening to others, listen to yourself.

His own evidence comes from work habits. He said that when thinking about copywriting, 90% of the time is spent on one process, which is not immersed in writing, but listening. First listen to what the client says, and ask about the purpose of the advertisement that the other party cannot explain clearly to you; then listen to yourself, create another self in your mind, and repeat the interview until a certain sentence emerges.

If this action of “creating another self in your mind” looks familiar to you, it’s because the “AI Board of Directors Law” I wrote before is actually a digital version of the same thing: letting different characters take turns to question you, forcing you to clarify your vague thoughts. The only difference is that Toshiya Araki does not use AI, he plays the role of the person who asks questions.

I think the self-questions and answers demonstrated in the book are more practical than any copywriting skills book. The topic is how to get more people to listen to radio programs. Two “Is” go back and forth in my mind: when do you usually listen to the radio, why don’t you listen to it, what if you use a mobile app, will you want to listen to it, and what else can make you interested in radio besides this. It was only on the fifth and sixth rounds of questioning that the perspective of disaster prevention came up, and finally he came up with a sentence: Radio is a disaster prevention item that can be carried with you.

The point is not how good the copy is, the point is that it came in the sixth round, not the first.

There is one more thing worth noting. In 2023, he took the exam for the Japanese nationally certified career counselor certificate. Colleagues asked him why, what would a copywriter do to take this exam? His answer is: The work contents of copywriting and career consulting are actually very similar. They both use words to express what the other party has not yet formed in their heart.

I paused when I read this. This is essentially what I have been doing at the teaching site in the past few years.

Three steps, the key is the order

The core of the book is a three-minute daily note-taking technique, with three steps: accumulation, listening, and compilation.

Step one: accumulate

Use your mobile phone to jot down “experiences + feelings”, it only takes a few seconds, whether during commuting or during odd breaks.

Here’s a rule that’s easy to skip: remember both, not just the experience. If you just write “I finished the briefing,” you won’t be able to move forward; instead, write “I finished the briefing, and I’m very excited now.” And the feelings should be expressed in words that really come out of your mouth at the moment, such as super happy, annoyed, angry, what a joke, don’t embellish it.

Step two: listen

Find a space where you can sit down that night, spread out your notebook, write a question in the upper left corner and frame it, for example: After finishing the briefing, I feel very excited now. Why is this? Then, within three minutes, write at least five sentences below.

The time limit and word limit are both designed. Three minutes force you to have no time to self-examine, five sentences force you to go beyond the two most superficial sentences.

Step three: summarize

Look back at the records of more than five sentences, circle the words that appear repeatedly or have similar meanings, and then condense them into one sentence of your own conclusion. If the circle cannot be drawn, add another three minutes and repeat step 2.

The book also gives an additional step called advance preparation: taking the conclusion one step further and turning it into concrete actions. Add this sentence after you have come to a conclusion, so that you don’t end up feeling good but nothing has changed.

I want to talk specifically about order. These three steps are not new at all, and many people have done one or two of them. But Shunya Araki arranged them into a directional line: from a specific thing, to an abstract conclusion, and then back to a specific action. He pointed this out himself in Chapter 5, saying that the whole set of note-taking techniques is actually practicing the ability to switch between concrete and abstract.

If you have ever been told that you were not specific enough or that your speech lacked focus, you are usually stuck on a certain section of this line and cannot move.

Three listening tips that I can use in my class next week

The three tips mentioned in Chapter 2 are, I think, the most immediately applicable parts of the book, and they can’t only be used on yourself.

Tip 1: Ask questions in the order of “experience → feeling”

There are two versions of the same conversation in the book. When a colleague complains about his supervisor, the listener in the first version keeps saying that it’s really hard on you and don’t push yourself too hard, and then starts to suggest that he apply for a transfer department; in the second version, the listener only asks a few questions: What happened to you and your supervisor recently? How did you quarrel? What happened? He pushed forward his plan?

Ask things out first, then ask about feelings. After asking about the second version, the complainer himself said the key sentence: In terms of planning, the supervisor did a really good job, so I was even more upset.

The first version never asks this question.

Tip 2: Don’t rush to give advice

I like what Toshiya Araki said: Don’t talk to yourself, but listen to yourself. Once you start to convince yourself and start to draw conclusions, the scope of your thinking becomes narrower.

But this trick is the hardest for me. Because this is an occupational disease of lecturers, I am very used to asking questions and giving answers in class. I probably know where the question is halfway through the lecture, and it is difficult not to answer it. This book reminded me that if I hold back for those thirty seconds, the other person’s own version will be much more useful than the version I gave him.

Tip 3: Explore the definition

The example in the book is a senior who has worked in a human resources company for ten years. He just took on an important project and was worried that he was not good at being a leader. The listener didn’t give advice, just asked: What does a leader look like to you?

The definition given by the senior first is: a person who can use jokes to ease the situation, and a person who is good at encouraging with praise. And he himself is not good at joking and complimenting others, so he can’t help but feel anxious.

The listener then asked: “You said there are many types, what are the others?” The senior thought for a while and gave the second set of definitions: people who will not give up until the end, people who help guide the direction, and people who lead the masses.

After he finished speaking, he relaxed and said that it turned out that I was too conceited and thought that this was what a leader should be like.

No one gave him any advice from beginning to end. In the book, this action is called compiling a dictionary of your own. I think this is the most worth practicing in the book. Because behind the big words everyone speaks, such as temperature, professionalism, texture, and influence, there is an unspoken private definition hidden behind them, and that definition is often the source of anxiety.

This is a great idea and I plan to try it out at my next workshop. When a student says he wants to write with more warmth, maybe I don’t have to rush to teach him how to write. I can first ask him what temperature means to him.

In the final analysis, these three tips all practice the same thing, which is questioning power. In an era when AI makes execution cheaper, people who can ask questions are more valuable than people who can give answers.

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If you also want to continue to add fresh perspectives on writing, expression and content management in the AI era, welcome to subscribe to my “Vista AI Inspiration Supply Station” and let me send the latest thinking directly to you.

I have some hesitations

About handwriting

This is the section in the whole book that I hesitated the most. Araki Toshiya gave three reasons why everyone should use pen and paper more: first, to create a period of time that escapes from daily life; second, there is no delete button on the paper, so what you write will not be immediately modified into a beautiful appearance; third, you can keep it for regular review. He even recommended a pen: PENTEL signature pen S520, which is medium-thick and water-based and does not show through the back.

I am a heavy digital worker, and my workflow goes from Obsidian, Anytype to Claude Code. If I am asked to transfer the entire set of notes back to paper, I can naturally do it, but I will think about it: Is it really necessary?

But the second reason half convinced me. The fact that there is no delete button is really a disadvantage. When I was writing on the keyboard, I was already changing the first half of the sentence before I finished it. What I changed was the wording, but what I changed was the original thought that was more rude and true.

Therefore, my compromise is: keep steps 1 and 3 in digital tools, and give the three minutes of step 2 to pen and paper. It’s only three minutes anyway. Many years ago I wrote an article “Are you writing notes, or are the notes writing about you?” 〉, looking back now, the answer given by this book is more specific: the tool is not the point, the point is whether you really heard yourself in those three minutes.

About five days

The title of the book promises five days, and Chapter 4 does indeed give five consecutive practice days, with one life situation every day: feeling irritable about interpersonal relationships, feeling annoyed when being assigned work before get off work, feeling happy when receiving praise from clients, feeling angry because of a word from a partner, and feeling happy while walking with family. Well designed, with both positive and negative emotions.

But Araki Toshiya himself wrote very clearly in the last chapter: There will be no day when this thing is finished. He said that skills can be learned quickly, abilities need time to be honed, and expressiveness is an ability, not a skill.

I think five days is the price of admission, not the warranty period. If you open this book with the expectation that you will learn to speak in five days, you will probably be disappointed on the sixth day.

Little is said about AI in this book

The original book was published in Japan in 2024. AI is not considered as a theme throughout the book. At first glance it may seem like a shortcoming, but I think this is the best thing about it now.

Last week I was talking about Mark with the host Tang Xianglong (opens in a new tab) on UFO Radio. Xue Fu’s “AI Changes Your Customers” has a word in the book called cognitive offloading, which talks about the degradation of judgment after we hand over memory and thinking to tools. Microsoft’s survey found that the more confident employees were in AI, the greater their cognitive decline.

One of the easiest things to happen now is to throw “I can’t think clearly” directly to the AI, and then get back a smooth, complete text that sounds like a conclusion.

The problem is that that’s not your conclusion, it’s the result of the AI ​​playing Solitaire with you. Of course you can use it for business, but the next time someone asks you the same thing in person, the pause will still be there.

What Toshiya Araki wants to preserve in his whole method is exactly the part that is most easily outsourced: growing a sentence of his own from a pile of messy raw materials. Once this is outsourced, you never own it.

How do I plan to use it?

I’m going to use my own positioning as a question and run around for five days to see. From last winter to this summer, I focused on the four words “unmanned company”, and the process took longer than expected. The difficulty is never that I can’t think of an explanation, but that every version is correct, but there is no version that I am willing to tell a second time. Looking back according to the structure of this book, it is clear where I was stuck: I had been doing step three, but not step two. There is no material in hand, only pressure, and then I ask myself to produce a sentence directly.

So, I plan to change my approach in these five days. Record one work-related experience and feeling every day. Spend three minutes in the evening writing five sentences of experience. Five days later, look at the five sets of records to see if there are any recurring words.

If so, that word is probably what I really care about. If not, that’s an answer too.

This book will be released in September. Friends who are interested can go to blog (opens in a new tab) to have a look.

The last question

At the end of the fifth chapter of the book, Toshiya Araki asks a question: “When will a person be considered complete?”

He said he didn’t have a clear answer, but he didn’t believe that wholeness could only happen once. Every time you listen and speak your heart, those thoughts that were once spoken become whole again. There will never be a truly complete day in a person’s life, but he can experience completeness countless times.

The epilogue is a very homely scene. He went for an internal interview within the company. It was his first interview in the company after graduation and in twenty years. He prepared using the methods in the book, and finally condensed the conclusion: he wanted to engage in a job that could help others grow through words.

After writing this sentence, he suddenly thought of his parents. Both of them are elementary school teachers. After finishing their housework every night, they would go into the two-square-foot Japanese-style room at home, sit on the tatami, use the ironing board as a table, spread out the exam papers they brought back, and use a red pen to correct the scores one by one. When he was a child, he thought this was a normal scene. When he grew up, he realized that it was called overtime.

He had been doing advertising copywriting for twenty years, and the final sentence brought him back to what his parents did.

Only when I read this did I realize that on the surface this book teaches how to speak clearly, but it actually deals with another thing: how long has it been since you asked yourself a question, and then honestly wrote down the answer.

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Book News: Toshiya Araki “Have an idea, but can’t express it well?” Learn to express accurately in 5 days: The 3-step note-taking technique of Japan’s top copywriters, so that you will not be entangled or lack of words, and can express your unique point of view when you speak on the spot.” Translated by Xu Zhanning, illustrated by Ito HAMSTER, published by Caishi Culture, first edition in September 2026, priced at 380 yuan. ISBN 978-626-431-410-7. The original title of the book is “こうやって头のなかをverbalizedする”. ”, PHP Institute, 2024. Go to the blog to purchase the book (opens in a new tab).